My predictions about the iPad 3/iPad HD event and subsequent coverage:

• The new iPad will, objectively, be a decent upgrade regardless of what Apple adds to it.
• Immediate coverage will be mostly subjective, based in part on what Apple ‘left out’, despite never giving any indication such things were going to be added anyway.
• Apple will be slammed in the press for not including features that were dreamed up by hacks misinterpreting a single invite and trying to get hits with IPAD 3 CONFIRMED TO WARP SCREEN JUST LIKE T1000 headlines.
• A few sensible people will note that the update looks “pretty good actually”.
• Said people will be slammed as Apple fan-boys.
• The tech press will spew out a vomit of articles, explaining that the new iPad will be a sales disaster and 2012 will now be the year of the Android tablet.
• The new iPad will not be a sales disaster.
• 2012 won’t be the year of the Android tablet.
• 2013 will then roll around and we can all repeat the same bullshit yet again. HURRAH!

Google:

Starting today, Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore will become part of Google Play.

Google creating a media hub to compete with iTunes is smart. Google too often fires out numerous projects and they rarely mesh and gel. To be competitive when it comes to stuff you can shove on to a device, centralising everything makes a lot of sense. But Google Play? It’s an odd piece of branding. Apple’s ‘App Store’ and ‘iTunes Store’ are pretty dry but they’re also balanced brands used as a container for disparate things. With Google, however, you get:

Store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks

You ‘play’ songs—fair enough. And music is fundamentally a leisure activity. There’s also the well-known play icon, so the brand works well here.

Download more than 450,000 Android apps and games

Fair enough for games, but for apps? I’m not thinking ‘play’ when I use iA Writer, Brushes or many of the other productivity apps on my iPad. It seems strange to use ‘play’ as a descriptive word for housing Android’s apps.

Browse the world’s largest selection of eBooks

Do you ‘play’ a book? Reading is typically split between education and leisure, and ‘play’ is often very much the wrong word for the former.

Rent thousands of your favorite movies, including new releases and HD titles

This works similarly to songs, in the sense that you ‘play’ movies, although it’s easy enough to argue that this isn’t necessarily the best branding for movies that are research- and education-oriented.

I realise I’m overthinking this and many people simply won’t care nor think much about Google’s brand for its centralised resource for downloading apps and media; but to me the brand smacks of something that would be used for entertainment purposes only, and it isn’t suitable for apps that aren’t games and books/movies that aren’t primarily intended for fun.

EDIT: Sam Radford on Twitter makes an excellent point:

Though iTunes makes no sense for buying books, apps, movies, games, magazine, etc.

Of course, iTunes itself has mushroomed from an MP3 player into a media hub, but he’s right that the branding no longer makes sense—and it hasn’t for a while. Perhaps, then, it’s more about what we’re used to, in which case Google’s challenge will be in ‘training’ people to realise that Google Play encompasses everything—not just leisure apps and media. (Mind you, Google’s other challenge, judging by its past, will be in sticking with something for the long-term, too, and not axing/reworking its offering on a whim.)

Vlad Savov, reporting for The Verge:

Acer Global President Jianren Weng has been quoted at CeBIT today reiterating something he said at the beginning of December: ultrabooks will drop to the crazy-low price of $499 in 2013 and compete directly against Apple’s iPad.

Wow. That’s pretty bold. I guess the ultrabook thing’s worked out great for these guys, and they’re making money hand over fist, in order to make such dramatic price-cuts!

Speaking with Christoph Pohlmann of Acer’s laptop team, we learned that the current $799 / €699 price for the Aspire S3 is too low for Acer to actually generate any profit from it. The company is merely breaking even when selling its entry-level ultrabook model and the venture is only made worthwhile by the higher-specced SKUs pulling in a surplus.

Oh.

You’ve got to hand it to the DVD guys. Clearly responding to the kind of dickishness I wrote about recently, they’ve now set upon a course of action that will—shock!—enable you to unlock your DVDs and format-shift them to digital. Hurrah!

What’s that? There’s a catch, you say, Michael Weinberg, reporting for Public Knowledge?

The program, which would have merely been ill-advised had it been announced ten years ago, today stands as a testament to the ability of movie studios to blind themselves to reality.

*popcorn*

The entire program is designed to give consumers a way to take movies they already own on DVD and turn them into more portable digital files.

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me…

As reported by the LA Times, the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store

Sorry, what was that?

As reported by the LA Times, the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store

Right. I thought I’d gone insane for a moment and you’d said the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store! That would be bonkers!

As reported by the LA Times, the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store

Oh.

that will handle the digital conversion. Tsujihara described this process as allowing consumers to convert their libraries “easily, safely and at reasonable prices.”

If only there was a way for people to convert their libraries easily, safely and at reasonable prices at home, with, say, a PC or a Mac and a copy of Handbrake or similar software. Although, clearly, that wouldn’t help regarding the ‘safely’ bit, because, as we all know, Handbrake has a little-known ‘fire shuriken from your display’ feature that is randomly activated. [SUB: PLEASE CHECK THIS INFO PROVIDED BY A DVD GUY]

Oh, but hang on! This is about money, isn’t it? These guys want you to pay again for the content you’ve already bought and have therefore finally figured out a typically inept industry means of having you do so. Those scallywags! But really: taking your DVDs to a store? Waiting while the conversion is done? Waiting for some unspecified point in time where “Internet retailers like Amazon.com will email customers to offer digital copies of DVDs they previously bought”? Saying that ‘eventually’—presumably when cars fly through the air and meals are consumed in exciting sci-fi pill form—consumers will be able to put DVDs into PCs that will upload a copy, like how, um, Handbrake works right now?

If only there was a business model in a similar field that already existed, that wasn’t totally stupid, and that these guys could use as the basis of their own.

In What the iPad 3 really needs: fewer stupid articles about the iPad 3, I report on a couple of iPad articles, one of which talks about competing tablets and argues their features should be welded to the iPad. In the comments, Oliver Mason argues:

While I fully agree with most of your article […] the one thing I disagree is the stylus issue: since I bought an Adonit stylus I can use the iPad to replace paper for just jotting down notes in a way that is not possible with one of the ten built-in ones. Maybe it’s been too long since I did finger painting as a kid. True, it is easy-to-lose, but for me it really made the iPad that little bit more useful. One of the few issues where I think Steve got it wrong.

I haven’t felt this myself when using the iPad, and that’s primarily because certain input devices (be they a finger, a mouse, a stylus, or a joypad) are better for certain tasks. I don’t often jot notes on my iPad, and, these days, consider that kind of writing increasingly a niche activity. What I think’s most important is to get the default right in terms of what the user assumes is required. To my mind, a tablet with a stylus is arguing that the stylus is the best way to interact with the device—something Samsung tried to hammer home in its Galaxy Note advert (TUAW). But in over-emphasising a single-touch pointing device, you run the risk of detracting from what makes modern tablets so appealing from an interaction standpoint: multitouch. Being able to more fully immerse yourself in dealing with content by manipulating it directly is leagues ahead of a layer of abstraction that a pointing device provides.

I don’t doubt that there are some cases where a stylus is beneficial, and there are loads of third-party options available for the iPad that people can add to their set-up if they feel the need. But I think Steve Jobs got this dead right: by default, just you and the device is the set-up that is most intuitive, usable and forward-thinking.